I am very pleased to announce that we will have a new employee to administer the Tuition Grant, Minority Undergraduate Grant, and Minority Teacher Loan. Deanna Schulz will join our staff on September 6, 2011. The position was vacated when Mary Lou retired in June.

Molly Vidal’s telephone number has changed to 608-267-9389. Please make the change in your contact information.

Students have the opportunity to list as many as ten schools when they file their FAFSA. Schools have been notifying us that the school the student is attending is not on their notification list. If this is the case for a student attending your college/university, would you please have the student update their FAFSA so that the school they are attending is in one of the first three places. This change will also help keep our committed numbers more precise.

We will process covenant and foundation requests with the normal vouchering process on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning the first week of September. We initially had the covenant/foundation requests on a separate process but we feel confident that this process can be consolidated. Thank you for your patience during our “growing pains�? with the addition of the Covenant and Foundation grants.

We’ve been asked by several schools if there could be a separate list just for covenant and foundation scholars. Lee has written a separate program to provide that information to each school. That list will be placed on our secure socket layer and you can retrieve it the same way that you get the notification list. The naming convention: Notif_###_; CovNotif_###_ - The full combined file will remain the same [with WHEG/TG, TIP, MRG, Indian, Scholars, Foundation, etc]. Not all schools wanted a separate list and there is quite a bit of variation among financial aid offices. If you do not want/need this new file, you are under no obligation to use it. We have included the format layout as an attachment to this memo – if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

In addition, there will be policy and procedure updates for the Covenant Program. Notification of these changes will be made within the next few weeks.